Capture errors in Premiere : any advice?

Not sure whether this should be in hardware or the adobe premiere forum, but here goes.

I'm using a Canon MV600i camcorder and seem to be experiencing problems when capturing the footage in Premiere 6.5. I'm working on a 1.25Ghz G4 Powerbook running osX 10.3.7, with 1Gb ram and a 500Gb LaCie FireWire external hard drive.

When I switch the camera on, Premiere hangs and refuses to do anything, usually showing a message that says "DV control error". I've tried turning DV control off but it makes no difference. If I switch off the camera Premiere resumes working. I've tried several different FireWire cables, all with the same end result. I've also tried daisy chaining the camera to the LaCie, but that seems to hang as well.

It doesn't make any sense as I've used the camera with Premiere on a G3 Powermac at my old college with no trouble at all. The only thing I can think of is that the LaCie is somehow affecting the capture process, even though it is set up as the capture location. I tried capturing footage with the LaCie unplugged and it worked fine although my laptop's hard drive filled up ridiculously quickly to the extent that everything virtually ground to a halt and I couldn't actually edit any of the footage!